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As a Heat Wave Builds, Obama Wisely Presses for Community Cohesion

By Andrew C. Revkin July 21, 2016 2:47 pmJuly 21, 2016 2:47 pm

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President Obama used Twitter on Wednesday to urge Americans to check on neighbors as a heat wave builds this weekend.Credit

Updated in brackets | Along with commander in chief, President Obama could justify adding “chief resilience officer” as a new title, given how he smartly used Twitter on Wednesday to amplify government warnings about a dangerous heat wave spreading from the heartland to the East Coast in the next few days.

That resilience officer job title has become formalized of late as a growing list of city governments have joined the 100 Resilient Cities project of the Rockefeller Foundation. There are “C.R.O.’s” now from New York City to Chicago, from Accra, Ghana, to Medellín, Colombia. A big part of the job is to dissect a city as both a physical and social system and foster collaborative networks that can speed the identification of, and solutions to, emerging risks. The resilience officers, themselves, also form a global network, sharing what they learn.

What made Obama’s Twitter note particularly welcome was his last point: “Check on your neighbors.”

It reflects the president’s understanding that resilience is only partly about infrastructure, agency funding and the like; it’s also about community cohesion. It’s vital to have the capacity to recognize threats (thanks to sustained investments, at least so far, in weather and climate monitoring and analysis and the like). But the response to a threat depends on connectedness, down to the level of a city block.

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A behavior to avoid this weekend in much of the country’s midsection.Credit Juan Cristóbal Cobo for The New York Times

A classic case study in the value of cohesion was provided by the great Chicago heat wave of 1995. In his masterful book on that disaster, Eric Klinenberg described how two neighborhoods, similar in a host of ways, had profoundly different levels of heat deaths and related harms, with the difference being more about “block clubs” and church groups than emergency services.

It’s worth considering the lessons of Chicago in the context of the devastating loss of close to 15,000 people in France during Europe’s devastating 2003 heat wave, with the death rate, not to mention the chaotic aftermath, a function of a host of factors ranging from global warming shifting the odds of extreme heat to social norms leaving old people in harm’s way.

In a 2004 paper on France’s “collective failure” in its heat disaster, the crisis consultant Patrick Lagadec lamented that it seemed no one in France read Klinenberg’s book. Writing in the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, he said such situations have opened up “an entirely new front line in the crisis world” and called for a “switch from a mechanical or an architectural [approach] to a more ‘biological’ approach to read, seize, and handle emerging crises.”

This seems to be happening, albeit slowly. The Rockefeller Foundation effort, particularly if it includes spreading insights way beyond the 100 model cities, can help build a durable, flexible, reparable human fabric in ways that suit the complex, even “super wicked,” nature of these times.

President Obama certainly seems to have absorbed the concept. Klinenberg wrote a 2013 New Yorker feature describing the wider value, in the context of climate change, of the community traits that served parts of Chicago so well. In that piece he proposed that Obama’s early work as a community organizer in such neighborhoods in the 1980s may well have shaped how he built an administration focused on the human side of disaster preparedness and response.

Klinenberg, for example, quoted Nicole Lurie, who became the assistant secretary of health for preparedness and response in 2009 and still holds the position:

“There’s a lot of social-science research showing how much better people do in disasters, how much longer they live, when they have good social networks and connections…. And we’ve had a pretty big evolution in our thinking, so promoting community resilience is now front and center in our approach.”

Finally, it’s worth revisiting that presidential tweet. Social media, while all too often a source of noise, division and disinformation, can boost cohesion, care and responsiveness.

There’s plenty of evidence for this in places as different as quake-struck Himalayan villages and my Hudson Valley community, where the “Philipstown Locals” group on Facebook is the first place people (including me) turn when there’s a lockdown alert or bear sighting or bad traffic accident. (There’s a lesson there for news media, by the way.)

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.